many of you have heard that bees enjoy
but when you think of these which bees
are you thinking many people has to be
industrious honey bee but did you know
that there were over 20,000 species of
bees on the planet in Canada we have
over 850 different species in here in DC
we have 450 different species of bees
now that’s a lot of bees to have a
charge and if those bees are in trouble
so early it has one of every three bites
you eat is thanks to a pollinator and
it’s not just fruits and vegetables that
these help to pollinate its other really
wondrous things like coffee and
chocolate and I don’t know about you but
I do not want to live in a world without
coffee so why do leaves in trouble
scientists generally agreed there’s
three main reasons its use of pesticides
disease and lots of habitat and that’s
something each and everybody in this
room can do something about love of
habitat at 4 degree means we’ve taken on
this issue for a really big scale we’ve
been working in collaboration with the
city of Kelowna and the city of Richmond
to do something different so one of the
things we’ve done today
difference is here in Richmond at the
Bridgeport industrial park now this was
a park that people tended to go to but
they didn’t go through but not to it’s a
huge park is a thousand because that’s
300 plus meters and it fits under the
flight path for a wide er airport so
it’s very very busy place but it didn’t
have a lot to offer people or bees and
one of our aims was to work with the
city to change that to make it more
desirable for people to come to and also
to create a buffet of forage and flowers
for bees so what you’re seeing areas of
a poor shop our collaboration was with
the parks department and the
sustainability unit and they were in
charge of doing some of the heavy
lifting so the tilling and the
preparation of the site our job was to
design an earthwork that would attract
both people and Paul gears we were
supposed to design that earth work
install it and then do all the community
programming afterwards so this is the
design that we came up with what we
created is a kind of stained glassed
mini earth work based on all mobile inks
and so each of those sections is
designed with flowers that are
incredibly be friendly but there would
also bloom in succession from early
spring through to the fall so how do you
take a plan like this and actually make
it into a living public artwork well
those of you who have ever done a mural
you know that you need to start with a
grid plan in order to lay out the design
you also need to find somebody in this
instance who wasn’t really afraid of
heights
yes that is me standing there with my
hard hat and my cell phone and the plan
give me the instructions down to our
amazing team as well who in turn had a
lot of rope and we use that rope to lay
out the B design the beam beam design
and then we raked it all that hand
seeded it with color coded C hand
written in with an amazing team and then
we waited we waited to read we we graded
waiting for mother nature to cooperate
and we waited for these but we wanted to
entice those bees so how Dean is
certainly initiating in the Lower
Mainland so we thought we would provide
something for the piece and each and of
the thousand foot long field is anchored
with a native aviary sculpture and so we
designed this color number honey bees
but for all those other native bees like
bumblebees leave Cairo bees biting these
hairy belly bees and we were rewarded
over the course of that season of having
an array of tenants checking in and out
of our insect hotel we also have a
sister pasture up in Kelowna which is a
really amazing way to do this research
because we’re able to compare and
contrast different ways of design and
installation and the different regions
that were working with and so we’re able
to share that information but the other
thing that we share are the artists that
we work with here you’ll see in the red
t-shirt artist Samuel Royle watt and he
is working on a community
culture a one-day sculpture called small
world and it was designed to show that
interconnectivity of labour height work
if you will and the ways in which
together we can build something in a
very short period of time that we
wouldn’t really be able to do on her own
in this generation in Kelowna Samuel
painted the boxes so that they were in
colors that were attractive to bees but
when we invited him down to our tricks
for the past year we had a little
something else in mind and so he created
a sculpture that was just white and here
you see it in preparation for
installation with the community at one
of our pollinator techniques here are
the two sculptures in contrast so the
one on the top is from Kelowna the one
on the bottom originally you know that
after life of our sculpture was
incredibly important and what we had in
mind was to use those boxes to work with
community groups like this one here
which was that David Suzuki foundations
butterfly white project and convert
those former sculptures into bumblebee
houses so people could personalize them
help convert them and then take them
back to their own gardens or community
spots community gardens and other
greenways to install for bumblebees and
here you see one me in my past year back
in color so they’re community engagement
is really critical to our work that
hands-on engagement with people we lost
that work with other artists like Sharon
callous who is an environmental artist
based internet clear what Sharon is she
came out to our pasture in Richmond and
she put together a series of work art
parties in the first one we helped her
harvest the invasive species in Malaya
blackberry which is predominant
[Music]
she knows that fiber back to her studio
and process process that bit so that it
was workable and they’ve brought it back
to the pasture and over a series of
weeks she worked with open format when
people drop in and learn how to leave
that binary the rope was then created
converted and created into these
gorgeous butterfly net sculptures that
were suspended in the trees
a really critical component to this is
that when we were doing these work
partners people weren’t just learning
how to coil the rope but they were also
hearing music they were listening to
people who were telling stories about
these and they were listening to the
specialists talking about be
conservation and why these are important
so it was a way of bringing the hand and
the heart and the mind together and
learning on these different levels
different ways for people to access this
new information education is such a
critical part of what we do on this
project and we are out there in all
kinds of weather we’re leading groups
we’re leading tours we’re doing hands-on
education and taking people on site to
actually see the change that’s evolving
over also working with local groups and
here you see the can be eco sayers so
this is a group of environmentally
minded students or just down the road at
the candy secondary school and in our
first year they grew a sunflower wall
for us to do that they planted six
hundred sunflower
so the south side of their building
every single winter cell was covered
with tiny little plants and when they
grew big enough they came bouncing back
up to the pasture and created this huge
living wall that I derived for the
entire store some flowers an incredibly
friendly plant and people want to be
involved and that kind of community
engagement helped to inspire this
project up in Kelowna which was the
columnar nectar trail so we were able to
create an eight and a half kilometer
nectar trail out of people’s back
gardens blood gardens school gardens and
community gardens but what’s the nectar
trail
it is that connection of foraging sites
for bees so that they can collect enough
movement also to create biodiversity as
they go through now we were hoping that
we would have at least fifty women
participants but by the beginning of the
summer we had almost 100 and these
magnificent participants became aren’t
be ambassadors and so they were they
would come and they would have workshops
learning about these learning about how
to plant their gardens they get a be
ambassador kit which would have a long
sign that would inform their neighbors
I’m willing to talk about these they
also gave me friendly flowers for their
region and they would get a bee ID book
which was another way in which they
could be involved in the conservation
which leads us to our new app this is
citizen science app insight and it’s the
first system science app for helping to
support native bees in North America and
so this is a way that people can
actively won’t be involved in working
with scientists
collecting data about how these are
oranjee what flowers that are attracted
to but also the diversity that already
exists in certain locations here are two
pollinators are they both these are as
one just pretending to be me they both
do a fine job
but they’re attracted to different types
of flowers and you know work in the
field with our volunteers we teach them
how to know the difference in order to
gather that data to bring back to people
like our collaborator dr. Elizabeth
alley at Simon Fraser University in
order to understand if we’re moving in
the right direction now I’m not a
scientist I’m an artist but I work with
scientists I’ve worked with other
experts in the field and they have
joined me how do you do this work and in
turn I’ve been teaching other people how
to do this work and it’s vital an
important work to do and anyone can do
it from children to seniors anyone who’s
interested and being able to be part of
the solution and help scientists with
but we can’t always get people out to
the pasture and this work isn’t
exclusively about science and so we
figured out a way through our exhibition
for all’s for yourself to bring the
pasture to the people as to what we did
is we created this exhibition from
10,000 laser-cut bees made from handmade
see favorite but we didn’t make that
paper alone whenever we do this project
we run a series of workshops with the
community helping to make the paper and
so we use recycled paper
in this case in Richmond from here to
middling car
we brought paper when we brought paper
from the city and we converted that into
pulp
we had over 16 different workshops where
people would help us make paper and we’d
also be able to talk about steam
distribution oftentimes people will get
a package of seeds and they’ll think oh
that’s enough to cover my kitchen table
when actually it’s probably enough to
cover your entire kitchen we would then
take that apron back to our studio and
dry it and then take it to be laser-cut
from there we did install the exhibition
here it is as an installation our second
iteration in Colombo it is installed one
at a time and if you’re wondering how
long it takes to install ten thousand
bees
I can tell you it’s a week with a lot of
help
but all that labor is really worth it
when people walk into the gallery and
they’re surrounded by the enormity of
the project and the enormity of that
many physical bees ten thousand can be a
very abstract number but it’s quite
different when you are completely
immersed in it and the loss of 10,000
bees takes on a new and different
meaning at the end of each exhibition we
give away half of the bees and so in a
way people are able to take a mini
pasture in their pocket in the warm of a
paper beat each time we do the
installation again we repeat the process
and so we make paper with a new group
and we use sees they’re specific to
their region and we’ve taken this
project now across the borders so we are
truly border free and we have a project
happening in both the US and in Mexico
so a lot of people come to eat and they
say I want to help these are in trouble
I’m going to become a beekeeper and I
can tell you though as a beekeeper it’s
a lot of work it’s a lot of hard
back-breaking work but again at the time
and the energy and the motivation
fantastic but many of you maybe most of
you don’t but there’s lots of ways that
you can actually be part of the solution
you can do simple things like if you
have a balcony planet full of bee
friendly flowers and pots things like
sunflower or lavender or clothing you
can dedicate one square meter of care
community garden or your own garden to
be friendly wildflowers and then make
sure you’re not using pesticides you can
make sure your neighbors are using
pesticides you can talk to people about
bees you can take your smart phone and
put it to work and enjoy the citizen
science project or you can start your
own community project you don’t have to
wait for BorderFree bees
you can do your own but really the key
is that you can be a beekeeper just consider keeping
but when you think of these which bees
are you thinking many people has to be
industrious honey bee but did you know
that there were over 20,000 species of
bees on the planet in Canada we have
over 850 different species in here in DC
we have 450 different species of bees
now that’s a lot of bees to have a
charge and if those bees are in trouble
so early it has one of every three bites
you eat is thanks to a pollinator and
it’s not just fruits and vegetables that
these help to pollinate its other really
wondrous things like coffee and
chocolate and I don’t know about you but
I do not want to live in a world without
coffee so why do leaves in trouble
scientists generally agreed there’s
three main reasons its use of pesticides
disease and lots of habitat and that’s
something each and everybody in this
room can do something about love of
habitat at 4 degree means we’ve taken on
this issue for a really big scale we’ve
been working in collaboration with the
city of Kelowna and the city of Richmond
to do something different so one of the
things we’ve done today
difference is here in Richmond at the
Bridgeport industrial park now this was
a park that people tended to go to but
they didn’t go through but not to it’s a
huge park is a thousand because that’s
300 plus meters and it fits under the
flight path for a wide er airport so
it’s very very busy place but it didn’t
have a lot to offer people or bees and
one of our aims was to work with the
city to change that to make it more
desirable for people to come to and also
to create a buffet of forage and flowers
for bees so what you’re seeing areas of
a poor shop our collaboration was with
the parks department and the
sustainability unit and they were in
charge of doing some of the heavy
lifting so the tilling and the
preparation of the site our job was to
design an earthwork that would attract
both people and Paul gears we were
supposed to design that earth work
install it and then do all the community
programming afterwards so this is the
design that we came up with what we
created is a kind of stained glassed
mini earth work based on all mobile inks
and so each of those sections is
designed with flowers that are
incredibly be friendly but there would
also bloom in succession from early
spring through to the fall so how do you
take a plan like this and actually make
it into a living public artwork well
those of you who have ever done a mural
you know that you need to start with a
grid plan in order to lay out the design
you also need to find somebody in this
instance who wasn’t really afraid of
heights
yes that is me standing there with my
hard hat and my cell phone and the plan
give me the instructions down to our
amazing team as well who in turn had a
lot of rope and we use that rope to lay
out the B design the beam beam design
and then we raked it all that hand
seeded it with color coded C hand
written in with an amazing team and then
we waited we waited to read we we graded
waiting for mother nature to cooperate
and we waited for these but we wanted to
entice those bees so how Dean is
certainly initiating in the Lower
Mainland so we thought we would provide
something for the piece and each and of
the thousand foot long field is anchored
with a native aviary sculpture and so we
designed this color number honey bees
but for all those other native bees like
bumblebees leave Cairo bees biting these
hairy belly bees and we were rewarded
over the course of that season of having
an array of tenants checking in and out
of our insect hotel we also have a
sister pasture up in Kelowna which is a
really amazing way to do this research
because we’re able to compare and
contrast different ways of design and
installation and the different regions
that were working with and so we’re able
to share that information but the other
thing that we share are the artists that
we work with here you’ll see in the red
t-shirt artist Samuel Royle watt and he
is working on a community
culture a one-day sculpture called small
world and it was designed to show that
interconnectivity of labour height work
if you will and the ways in which
together we can build something in a
very short period of time that we
wouldn’t really be able to do on her own
in this generation in Kelowna Samuel
painted the boxes so that they were in
colors that were attractive to bees but
when we invited him down to our tricks
for the past year we had a little
something else in mind and so he created
a sculpture that was just white and here
you see it in preparation for
installation with the community at one
of our pollinator techniques here are
the two sculptures in contrast so the
one on the top is from Kelowna the one
on the bottom originally you know that
after life of our sculpture was
incredibly important and what we had in
mind was to use those boxes to work with
community groups like this one here
which was that David Suzuki foundations
butterfly white project and convert
those former sculptures into bumblebee
houses so people could personalize them
help convert them and then take them
back to their own gardens or community
spots community gardens and other
greenways to install for bumblebees and
here you see one me in my past year back
in color so they’re community engagement
is really critical to our work that
hands-on engagement with people we lost
that work with other artists like Sharon
callous who is an environmental artist
based internet clear what Sharon is she
came out to our pasture in Richmond and
she put together a series of work art
parties in the first one we helped her
harvest the invasive species in Malaya
blackberry which is predominant
[Music]
she knows that fiber back to her studio
and process process that bit so that it
was workable and they’ve brought it back
to the pasture and over a series of
weeks she worked with open format when
people drop in and learn how to leave
that binary the rope was then created
converted and created into these
gorgeous butterfly net sculptures that
were suspended in the trees
a really critical component to this is
that when we were doing these work
partners people weren’t just learning
how to coil the rope but they were also
hearing music they were listening to
people who were telling stories about
these and they were listening to the
specialists talking about be
conservation and why these are important
so it was a way of bringing the hand and
the heart and the mind together and
learning on these different levels
different ways for people to access this
new information education is such a
critical part of what we do on this
project and we are out there in all
kinds of weather we’re leading groups
we’re leading tours we’re doing hands-on
education and taking people on site to
actually see the change that’s evolving
over also working with local groups and
here you see the can be eco sayers so
this is a group of environmentally
minded students or just down the road at
the candy secondary school and in our
first year they grew a sunflower wall
for us to do that they planted six
hundred sunflower
so the south side of their building
every single winter cell was covered
with tiny little plants and when they
grew big enough they came bouncing back
up to the pasture and created this huge
living wall that I derived for the
entire store some flowers an incredibly
friendly plant and people want to be
involved and that kind of community
engagement helped to inspire this
project up in Kelowna which was the
columnar nectar trail so we were able to
create an eight and a half kilometer
nectar trail out of people’s back
gardens blood gardens school gardens and
community gardens but what’s the nectar
trail
it is that connection of foraging sites
for bees so that they can collect enough
movement also to create biodiversity as
they go through now we were hoping that
we would have at least fifty women
participants but by the beginning of the
summer we had almost 100 and these
magnificent participants became aren’t
be ambassadors and so they were they
would come and they would have workshops
learning about these learning about how
to plant their gardens they get a be
ambassador kit which would have a long
sign that would inform their neighbors
I’m willing to talk about these they
also gave me friendly flowers for their
region and they would get a bee ID book
which was another way in which they
could be involved in the conservation
which leads us to our new app this is
citizen science app insight and it’s the
first system science app for helping to
support native bees in North America and
so this is a way that people can
actively won’t be involved in working
with scientists
collecting data about how these are
oranjee what flowers that are attracted
to but also the diversity that already
exists in certain locations here are two
pollinators are they both these are as
one just pretending to be me they both
do a fine job
but they’re attracted to different types
of flowers and you know work in the
field with our volunteers we teach them
how to know the difference in order to
gather that data to bring back to people
like our collaborator dr. Elizabeth
alley at Simon Fraser University in
order to understand if we’re moving in
the right direction now I’m not a
scientist I’m an artist but I work with
scientists I’ve worked with other
experts in the field and they have
joined me how do you do this work and in
turn I’ve been teaching other people how
to do this work and it’s vital an
important work to do and anyone can do
it from children to seniors anyone who’s
interested and being able to be part of
the solution and help scientists with
but we can’t always get people out to
the pasture and this work isn’t
exclusively about science and so we
figured out a way through our exhibition
for all’s for yourself to bring the
pasture to the people as to what we did
is we created this exhibition from
10,000 laser-cut bees made from handmade
see favorite but we didn’t make that
paper alone whenever we do this project
we run a series of workshops with the
community helping to make the paper and
so we use recycled paper
in this case in Richmond from here to
middling car
we brought paper when we brought paper
from the city and we converted that into
pulp
we had over 16 different workshops where
people would help us make paper and we’d
also be able to talk about steam
distribution oftentimes people will get
a package of seeds and they’ll think oh
that’s enough to cover my kitchen table
when actually it’s probably enough to
cover your entire kitchen we would then
take that apron back to our studio and
dry it and then take it to be laser-cut
from there we did install the exhibition
here it is as an installation our second
iteration in Colombo it is installed one
at a time and if you’re wondering how
long it takes to install ten thousand
bees
I can tell you it’s a week with a lot of
help
but all that labor is really worth it
when people walk into the gallery and
they’re surrounded by the enormity of
the project and the enormity of that
many physical bees ten thousand can be a
very abstract number but it’s quite
different when you are completely
immersed in it and the loss of 10,000
bees takes on a new and different
meaning at the end of each exhibition we
give away half of the bees and so in a
way people are able to take a mini
pasture in their pocket in the warm of a
paper beat each time we do the
installation again we repeat the process
and so we make paper with a new group
and we use sees they’re specific to
their region and we’ve taken this
project now across the borders so we are
truly border free and we have a project
happening in both the US and in Mexico
so a lot of people come to eat and they
say I want to help these are in trouble
I’m going to become a beekeeper and I
can tell you though as a beekeeper it’s
a lot of work it’s a lot of hard
back-breaking work but again at the time
and the energy and the motivation
fantastic but many of you maybe most of
you don’t but there’s lots of ways that
you can actually be part of the solution
you can do simple things like if you
have a balcony planet full of bee
friendly flowers and pots things like
sunflower or lavender or clothing you
can dedicate one square meter of care
community garden or your own garden to
be friendly wildflowers and then make
sure you’re not using pesticides you can
make sure your neighbors are using
pesticides you can talk to people about
bees you can take your smart phone and
put it to work and enjoy the citizen
science project or you can start your
own community project you don’t have to
wait for BorderFree bees
you can do your own but really the key
is that you can be a beekeeper just consider keeping
Please follow and like us: